Update 4/13/14 - 7 Weeks Old!

Seven Weeks

Tomorrow they are seven weeks old. They've really accepted their new place as home. Now they explore the entire inside enclosure. They've got tons of space and obstacles to climb on. They gotten used to the freedom and aren't as eager to come to our hands. I spent a lot of time chasing them around!

Leg bands

Our plastic leg bands arrived. We have five colors - white, yellow, green, pink and purple. They are hard plastic and you slide one end into the other to lock them on. We put one of each color onto each Buff Orpington so we will be able to tell them apart better. Bromley is wearing the pink one. We put one of each color on the Leghorns and then put two bands on the 6th Leghorn. We soon found out that the smallest Leghorn with the green band is too small for the bands and it fell off. For now she will be bandless. For the Easter Eggers, since we can tell them apart so easily, we put white bands of them and I am planning to write their names on them. We figured they should have bands too.

Treats

This week I gave them a little spray millet from my hand each time we went down to check on them. I'm trying to reinforce the super friendly hand fed chick behavior they were showing previously that they kinda lost over the last week. Moving outside has given them a little more spunk and a little less dependency on us. They still go crazy for our hands when they know food is involved. They are able to swallow the balls of spray millet whole now. They have grown so much! I've noticed they peck a lot harder now too. We bought them a little planter of wheat grass and they devoured it. I wasn't sure how much they would like it but they ate it all up! We gave them a dandelion - the whole plant and roots and they really enjoyed that. I gave them a whole pot of vegetables and they spread them all over their enclosure and then eventually ate them all  up. We even caught some live worm and slugs from around the yard and watched them go crazy for those. I am having a lot of fun introducing them to new treats.

Petrie 

After banding our chicks I decided to check the Leghorns for the one with the enlarged tummy - Petrie. Being marked with her own color would help us check her stomach each time we checked on the chickens and monitor any changes. When I flipped them each over to check which one was Petrie I couldn't figure it out. We checked all six Leghorns and determined that it is most likely the purple banded one. She has the lowest and largest tummy but really doesn't seem abnormal anymore. It was a great feeling to see that the tummy has turned out normal!

Waterer

The feeder we made is working great. We have it hanging off the ground and the chicks climb up on it and enjoy the set up. The waterer however does not work as planned. It isn't weighted right so we have to keep it sitting on something and the drinking area will overflow if too much water is put in. For now it is working fine to hold water but we will need to remake it if we want the low maintenance of a gravity flow waterer that hold a lot of water. Being on the ground mean it gets really dirty really fast. When we make a new waterer we will use the current one for food too and the new waterer will be able to hang of the ground to keep poop and shaving out of it.

New Babies

Our two new babies are doing great. They are down in the barn with the 7 week olds. They are now over a week old. They are in a small enclosure up on a table with a heat lamp and a mesh cover so that the bigger chicks can't pick on them. We have let them down to meet the older girls and some of them are really interested in the babies and will peck at them. Until they get bigger we don't really trust them alone together. The chicks do just fine with being pecked at and just kind of move away but we don't know how far the older girls would go if we weren't there to shoo them away. The babies are soooo little! They are eating and drinking fine. We have decided to name them Winona and Andromeda. They have been so easy breezy compared to the big batch. So far we haven't noticed any poopy butt!

Progress Pages:

Spider
Meeko
Ayden
Seraphina
Helen

Buff Orpingtons
Brown Leghorns 

Silver Laced Wyandottes